Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

mobile.bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#41

Post by tarr11 »

This looks like an example of "Software Eating the World". http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

Many law firms are doing automated textual analysis of legal work that used to be done by associates. The fact that they are still making more profit implies that they've just gotten more efficient. I suppose that there are a set of legal software companies that are probably profiting pretty well on this.

"Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5 million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of 86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine."

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#42

Post by _delirium »

koralatov wrote: post #36
hnhg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've picked on the worst-off countries in western Europe, but tell me about the best-off like Germany or Scandinavian countries. As far as I can tell, they have pretty generous social welfare schemes but are pretty sound economically. How does that factor into your model? Could it be that other cultural factors are at play?

Based on talking with Norwegians, who are quite numerous in my part of the UK, the relative health of their social welfare schemes compared with the UK's mostly due to a much, much higher level of taxation, and a huge cultural difference regarding levels of entitlement. The `professional' unemployed, for example, don't appear to exist in anything like the same numbers in Norway, which removes a significant source of…

This doesn't counter your main point (taxation in Scandinavia is much higher, as part of their social-democratic system), but your specific examples are "sin taxes" and not really intended to raise significant revenue. The Nordic countries all have very high alcohol taxes due to problems with alcoholism, and all of them except Denmark restrict alcohol sales to the state liquor monopoly, which has high prices, and purposely restricted hours to attempt to discourage binge drinking (e.g. the Swedish stores close at 3pm on Fridays, and don't open at all on weekends). There was a strong prohibition movement in the early 20th century, around the same time that the U.S. had one, but in the Nordic countries the tax/monopoly model narrowly won out over outright prohibition. Automobile and cigarette taxes are also there primarily to discourage greater use of those products.

The main taxes intended to actually raise revenue are corporate/personal income taxes, and the VAT.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#43

Post by guelo »

tokenadult wrote: post #3

From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last." There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the s…

I've heard many gen Y'ers talking about how baby boomers screwed it up for them but I had never heard baby boomers saying the same about their parent's generation. It doesn't make that much sense to me since boomers are retiring better off than their parents while gen Y is the first generation that will be worst off.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#44

Post by bmmayer1 »

koralatov wrote: post #40
bmmayer1 wrote: post #22

As a member of Generation Y, it is hard to have much sympathy for the "plight" of GenY compared to pretty much any other generation in world history. We haven't been drafted into foreign wars or had to suffer through a real depression. A third of us didn't die in an influenza epidemic. Our women and minorities haven't had to face entrenched and legally immovable workplace discrimination. We have had to face no real l…

Not that I'm defending grumblers, but I think a lot of the upset and anger comes from the fact that the opportunities aren't as readily available as they once were. The developed world is a much more regimented place than it once was, with fewer employers will to take chances on the people they employ. The classic trap a lot of Gen Y find themselves in is that they're not considered for jobs because they don't have e…

I don't know. There have been a lot of stories how young people are just a lot less willing to take risks than they used to be. I can tell you for a fact there are wide open $120k jobs in North Dakota and they are desperate for young up-and-comers, but no one wants to move to North Dakota. Older generations just didn't have that privilege.

A generation ago, Gen Xers would leave home and move across the country just to have opportunity. Now, people are living with their parents til the age of 30. It's partially a change in culture and partially a consequence of not needing to really take risk to get ahead. The prevailing attitude is "I deserve this, so I'll just wait and it will come to me." At least that's the attitude among many of my peers.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#45

Post by tsotha »

w1ntermute wrote: post #5
tokenadult wrote: post #3

From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last." There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the s…

> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without…

>There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.

That works out mathematically, but it's not going to work in practice. Just because you don't die before you're 90 doesn't mean you can work any longer than your grandparents did, even assuming somebody still wants to employ you.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#46

Post by slurry »

tokenadult wrote: post #3

From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last." There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the s…

> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats.

Just curious what you mean by this. East Asian and West European nations do have very different models of political economy compared to each other and the US, but both of them involve a much greater degree of state direction than even very liberal Americans would tolerate.

Also not sure how your ideas on educational policy fit there. Every East Asian nation I know of regulates education with extreme top-down strictness from the national level, even where they do allow/subsidize non-state schools.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#47

Post by hnhg »

koralatov wrote: post #36
hnhg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've picked on the worst-off countries in western Europe, but tell me about the best-off like Germany or Scandinavian countries. As far as I can tell, they have pretty generous social welfare schemes but are pretty sound economically. How does that factor into your model? Could it be that other cultural factors are at play?

Based on talking with Norwegians, who are quite numerous in my part of the UK, the relative health of their social welfare schemes compared with the UK's mostly due to a much, much higher level of taxation, and a huge cultural difference regarding levels of entitlement. The `professional' unemployed, for example, don't appear to exist in anything like the same numbers in Norway, which removes a significant source of…

I'm from the UK, recently moved to work in Germany. The tax is high by the standards I'm used to but the infrastructure and quality of life is much better and things are much cheaper to buy (food, rent & many household goods). There are major cultural differences though. Personal debt is frowned up - good luck in trying to use a credit card there and they don't have the culture of borrowing to buy (invest in) real estate in the same way.

There is also a subtle sense that sharing resources and participating to make them as good as possible is the logical approach to things, and it feels 'socialist' in a modern sense. I'm struggling to describe it but there is definitely something there when they prioritise what, where and how to spend money that is difficult for Brits to get their head around.

Also, I know a fair few Swedes and they all comment that they like our country but it's where they come to slum it and have fun. We were described as 'charmingly rough.'

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#48

Post by mrxd »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #22

As a member of Generation Y, it is hard to have much sympathy for the "plight" of GenY compared to pretty much any other generation in world history. We haven't been drafted into foreign wars or had to suffer through a real depression. A third of us didn't die in an influenza epidemic. Our women and minorities haven't had to face entrenched and legally immovable workplace discrimination. We have had to face no real l…

You're saying that every generation starts with nothing, as if they were new immigrants to this country. If so, then the American Dream is dead. Most immigrants worked hard because they believed that they could pass on a better life to their children. They saved to put their kids through college so that their future generations could have a nice life, white collar jobs, take vacations, etc.

But if they knew that future generations would be worse off, they probably wouldn't have bothered.

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#49

Post by akgerber »

donretag wrote: post #4

The employment problem is precisely why I do not think the housing market will ever "recover". Housing prices did not crash, they simply aligned themselves with current and forecasted salaries. Attempts at raising housing prices to "normal" levels is a fools game. Create the jobs and the salaries first and the rest will follow.

A lot of this country is "built out" under current zoning regimes which require auto-oriented detached single-family construction in most of the country, which is extremely land-intensive compared to traditional walkable urbanism.

Because land use in most of this country is very tightly regulated to prevent densification (or even cause de-densification in a lot of cities), most construction of new housing units has been on greenfield land at the outskirts of cities, so housing affordability has been correlated to access to new greenfield land at a city's edge, first via streetcar and street, then via expressway.

As the interstate highway system has been completed, and all developable land within a reasonable driving distance of the most economically successful metro areas has been built on, people have instead been forced to bid up existing housing, hence the ridiculously high housing prices in most coastal metro areas and ongoing gentrification of central neighborhoods in these cities. Moreover, as time goes on, many people who've grown up in single-family-only, automobile-only neighborhoods have discovered they like walkable urbanism better, and the current zoning regime guarantees it is in short supply in many markets.

Hopefully, we realize the economic folly of mandatory suburbanism as time goes on, and work to allow urbanization (a/k/a private property being used as its owners desire) in many mandatorily suburban areas now. It's happening to some degree already in Virginia: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/realestate/commercial/a-su... http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/10/27/transforming-tysons-cor...

Re: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

#50

Post by w1ntermute »

tsotha wrote: post #45
w1ntermute wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without…

>There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75. That works out mathematically, but it's not going to work in practice. Just because you don't die before you're 90 doesn't mea…

> Just because you don't die before you're 90 doesn't mean you can work any longer than your grandparents did

Why not? People are healthier than ever before, and are working jobs that require much less physical endurance.

> even assuming somebody still wants to employ you

Again, if you're living longer, your usefulness is decaying at a slower rate.

Post reply on HN